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Putin Accuses Opponents of Plotting to Tamper With Ballots

In a Russian campaign ad, a young woman is encouraged by her therapist to cast her first vote for Vladimir Putin, in terms that equate voting to sex.

Apparently hoping to cast doubt on any claims of voter fraud in this weekend’s presidential election in Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is widely expected to win, claimed on Wednesday that his opponents were plotting to tamper with ballots and blame it on his supporters.

In remarks reported by the Interfax news agency on Wednesday, Mr. Putin seemed to take a pre-emptive strike against any evidence of irregularities that might surface in Sunday’s vote. Speaking of his opponents, Mr. Putin said: “They are preparing to use some mechanisms that would confirm that the elections were falsified. They will stuff ballots themselves, monitor this themselves, and then present this themselves.” The prime minister also hinted darkly that his opponents might even stoop to the murder of a prominent member of the anti-Putin movement, just to tarnish him.

Days before the prime minister made this accusation, one of his supporters posted a video on YouTube that was described as evidence of an opposition plot to fabricate election fraud videos before Sunday’s vote. The four-minute clip, titled “Fraud in the March 4th Russian Presidential Election,” was filmed in the style of amateur exposés of official wrongdoing but was clearly staged.

A fictional clip posted online this week that recreates several incidents of voter fraud caught on video during last year’s parliamentary elections in Russia.

According to the blogger who uploaded the video, he stole the footage from “one of Moscow’s underground production studios.” Such fabrications, the anonymous blogger claimed, are being made under the direction of leading opposition figures like Aleksei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov, to be used as a pretext for people to flood the streets the day after the election and “feed us with revolutionary slogans, and scream that all has been stolen from them.”

Opposition leaders, who have already announced plans to hold a rally in central Moscow on Monday, the day after election, quickly posted a response to the video on the “League of Voters” LiveJournal site. “The aim is clear: They are mixing fakes with the real video footage of fraud that will definitely come,” said Andrei Malgin, an opposition blogger.

The YouTube mockumentary, which has been viewed more than 500,000 times this week, includes five scenes, each of which is a kind of homage to one of the viral videos that appeared to document voter fraud in the December elections.

The fictional clip opens with the story of a man who arrives at a polling station to vote, only to be told that, according to the electoral register, he has already done so. A similar scene unfolded in video posted on YouTube on Dec. 5.

In the second scene of the fictional video, the camera confronts a woman accused of leading a group of people who voted multiple times as she exits a polling place. As Julia Ioffe explained in a Foreign Policy article, on Election Day in December, an undercover reporter for the Russian site Lenta.ru described in detail how he had “participated in a ‘carousel,’ a Russian electoral innovation wherein voters are bused around to various polling stations,” voting for Mr. Putin’s United Russia Party at each stop. One of the most widely seen election fraud videos from December appeared to capture just such an operation in progress.

The fictional video’s third scene shows election officials slamming the door in the face of a young cameraman who catches them compiling phony ballots. It closely resembles video apparently documenting that practice the day before parliamentary elections in Yekaterinburg, a city in Russia’s Urals region.

Scene four of the faux documentary shows a carousel driver explaining that fraudulent pollgoers will be paid 500 rubles (about $17) for each vote. That would appear to indicate that inflation has risen since December, when a driver was apparently caught on video saying that the going rate was a bit less than 100 rubles per vote.

The fictional clip’s final scene seems to recreate the most famous video recorded on Election Day, Dec. 4, recorded by an observer who ambushed a poll worker as he filled in ballots himself. The original video, uploaded to YouTube on Dec. 4, has been viewed more than 2.2 million times.

Although the anonymous video blogger who posted the fictional clip on YouTube has not offered any evidence to support the claim that it was made by the opposition, not supporters of Mr. Putin, the idea was taken seriously by Ruslan Gattarov, a member of Mr. Putin’s ruling United Russia Party. In an interview with Dozhd TV, a cable and Internet channel, Mr. Gattarov said: “I think that most of the opposition, no matter how well Putin does — whether or not the elections are fair — they’re just not going to accept them, and therefore they need to create proof” of fraud.

Vladimir Y. Churov, Russia’s top election official and a Putin ally, first raised the idea that videos of fraud could be fakes days after December’s parliamentary elections. “Even before the elections, I heard about several fake polling places in apartments, where these movies were shot,” he said at the time. “I think we’ll see more of them.”

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